Friday, June 12, 2015

So today, on the last possible day to administer my End of Year REACH performance task (the test used to check how much I taught students and used to assign me a portion of my rating), I pushed aside our incredible sexual education curriculum to give one of my seventh grade classes the test.

Of course, I was already pretty skeptical of this assessment after last year's fiasco where the 7th grade library test had an extremely racist question in which the test designers made up fictional anti-immigration African American and Latina and forced students to choose one to support.
http://www.wbez.org/news/critics-blast-cps-immigration-test-question-offensive-inaccurate-110232

This was today's test:
https://dochub.com/xianfranzingerbarrett/aXyzER/social-science_grade-7_student_eoy14-15?pg=6

It featured the exact transgender rights principle that I had taught earlier in the week: "People have the right to express their own gender identity and choose how they are addressed". Only the test modeled the bigoted approach:

We do not know why Charley Parkhurst chose to live her life as a man, because we have no records of

interviews w

ith her. We do not know why Charley Parkhurst chose to live her life as a man, because we have no records of

interviews w

ith her. We do not know why Charley Parkhurst chose to live her life as a man, because we have no records of

interviews w

ith her.

We do not know why Charley Parkhurst chose to live her life as a man, because we have no records of

interviews w

ith her.

We do not know why Charley Parkhurst chose to live her life as a man, because we have no records of

interviews w

ith her.

We do not know why Charley Parkhurst chose to live her life as a man, because we have no records of interviews with her.

In fact, the title of the piece was printed on the top of every page:

I was pretty pissed. We've had discussions all week about identity, sexuality and gender, and it took considerable work to create a safe space where students were respectful of the concepts and each other's identification. Now I was administering a test--with my own job rating on the line--which directly violated those concepts.

One of my students raised their hand. "Why does it keep calling 'he' as 'she'"? I said, "Why do you ask?" "It seems like this test doesn't respect Charley's choice."

I said, "That's a great point. You can write that into your answer if you'd like."

The outcomes were incredible. The seventh graders were confused by the conflict of a test enforcing a transphobic narrative and what they knew was fair and right, and this what they came up with in response to the transphobic essay prompt, "Based on teh documents above (A-D), what are the reasons Charley Parker lived her life as a man? Be sure to explain your thinking and use evidence from 304 sources to support your answer."

DC (first crossed out all of the female pronouns and wrote in male ones to respect Charley's choices)No one can be for sure about this since he hasn't been interviewed. I would say it was by choice and under his circumstances, it would seem relevant. It states in document A that "Another Charley Parkhurst story is that he was the first 'woman' to vote in Colifornia". This might be a reason why he made the transition by his choice.

MG: The reason Charley Parker changed his gender was because he was a runaway and found his identity in being a male. Both documents A and C have information stating that Charley had family problems and decided to leave home. It also states that Charley loved his life as a male because he had a very important job and was very good at it without being judged by his gender.

EA:Charlie Parker (copying the wrong name from the question title) lived his life as a man for a couple of reasons. One of them was because he ran away from the orphanage. Another one was because he enjoyed driving and learning about horses.

JV: Charley Parker lived her life as a man because in Document A, it says that she voted so she was a guy. Also in Document C, Holiday said, "You are just the man I want". So Charley wanted to be a man and also because it was a good choice for her.

Some of the other students just referred to the subject by his chosen name Charley Parkhurst over and over again to avoid using the incorrect pronouns proscribed by the test.

Others got confused and thought that since the test was using female pronouns, that must have been Charley's choice, and so deduced that Charley must have been born a man but chose to be a woman because they couldn't believe that the testmakers could be that prejudiced. Others just wrote he/she in every sentence.

Additionally, I had to help them understand how to connect the documents to the questions as due to the identification of the documents and questions with different alphabet letters, it was hard for them to follow. They knew what primary and secondary sources were, but they couldn't navigate the poor design of the test. My recollection was that the Beginning of Year REACH Performance Task was far shorter and easier than this round--which would destroy the integrity of the growth measurement--but it's no longer available online, so I can't remember for sure.

In the end, they completed the test, we had a good chat and then they went off to the next class leaving me to input the scores for my rating.

But then the power and water went out at my school and we have no engineering position staffed by the district, so I couldn't put them in anyway.